John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York City. He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and graduated from Princeton University in 1942. He was in the Unites States Army Air Forces immediately following his graduation, until 1945. Brooks went to work for Time magazine, where he became a contributing editor. In 1949, he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. At the magazine, he wrote many articles and profiles about well-known business figures of the day. These profiles included Henry Ford II, Louis Rukeyser, Robert Moses, Arthur Laffer and Richard Whitney.
Brooks authored three novels, of which, The Big Wheel, published in 1949, was most notable. It described a newsmagazine similar to Time. He also published ten non-fiction books on business and finance. His best-known books were Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938, about the scandal surrounding Wall Street banker Richard Whitney; The Go-Go Years, which was about Wall Street in the 1960s; and The Takeover Game about the merger mania of the 1980s.
In his later years, Brooks's writing on finance won him three Gerald Loeb Awards. He also served as vice president of PEN for four years, a vice president of the Society of American Historians and a trustee of the New York Public Library from 1978 until 1993. Brooks died on July 27, 1993, in East Hampton, New York, from complications of a stroke.
His title Business Adventures was reprinted in 2014, after it had been featured in a Wall Street Journal article as Bill Gates's favorite business book.
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